A few weeks ago, I took the photos of about 30 employees for a government contractor in Fort Collins, CO. These were to be simple head shots for the company’s use on the web and in an employee directory. Nothing special.

Here’s a diagram to show how the lighting was set up for the employee photos:

The camera was about 15 feet from the subject, set to 70mm with a shutter speed of 1/250th to kill the ambient light. Aperture was set to 6.3 to throw that background a little out of focus (helped by the longer focal length). This also let me choose a low power on the flashes to use less juice and recycle quickly.

The key light was a Canon 430EX set to 1/4 power, and shooting through a translucent umbrella. I feathered the light forward to soften it and direct a good portion of the light across the subject and onto the reflector.

The gold reflector bounced the light back into the shadow areas and warmed them up, giving the subjects a nice glow.

The background light was a Vivitar 285HV, set to 1/16th power and zoomed out all the way to give a tight light pattern. It was up about 8 feet off the ground, and placed about 6 inches from the wall. The light was pointing down at about 45 degrees. This made the light sort of “skip” or “scrape” down that wall, adding lots of shadow to the rugged stone. Had I pointed the light straight at the wall from a distance, it would have come out looking flat and lack interest and shadow.

This was a very quick throw together shot. I got to the hotel about ten minutes before the employees, picked the spot in about a minute, and threw everything up in a hurry. Two test shots to get the lighting nailed and I was off and running. Bang bang bang, 30 people in about ten minutes. Each person was literally less than 20 seconds. They sit down, a couple posing instructions, *click*, “Next”.

One of the (many) things that differentiates pro shooters from hobbiests is that the pro shooter is always ready to capture that great shot. They don’t turn off their camera whenever they’re not actively shooting. They leave that lens cap off. They keep their finger near that shutter. And they keep looking for a photo op. After all, you never know when life will happen. If you’re not ready, you’ll miss the shot.

But this is an easy one for the amateurs to remedy.

A few weeks back we were commissioned to do a family portrait session for some friends of friends. We decided to make an afternoon of it and did some BBQing. We brought along our son (since we were also hanging out).

During the afternoon we spent half an hour or so in the backyard taking family photos. The little guy didn’t want any part of the family posed shots. So when we were done, we let mom and dad go inside and have a beer.

We stayed in the backyard and let the little guy play and have fun. As usual, he quickly forgot that I was chasing him around with a camera. We ran around and played guns (light stands make fantastic bazookas), and all was right in his world. I was happy because we went home with a big handful of photos that we were happy with. Mom and dad were too.

Up until this point everything went as planned. We were done shooting, got some great photos, and were just hanging out letting the little guys play. As soon as my wife let our son go to play, he made a bee line for our photo subject and laid a big hug on him. This moment literally lasted two seconds, because my son was off again and moving toward something else, probably a bug or a leaf or a blade of grass. Who knows.

Lucky for me I was ready for anything. Though we were done shooting, I left the camera turned on, the lens cap was in my pocket, and my finger was at the shutter. All I had to do was raise the camera to my eye, grab a quick focus, and snap the photo. I thought, “Hey, that’ll be cute” and moved on without a second thought.

We went back home and looked at the photos from the day. This one turned out to be our favorite. It was a favorite of the family we were there to shoot too. We even got a big print made up and displayed it at our booth at a local children’s festival. Countless people commented on this photo above all others in our portfolio.

These photos were taken with my Canon 20D fitted with a Canon 50mm f/1.8 lens (I love this cheapo lens). Color and contrast adjustments were made in Lightroom.

So if you want to increase the number of keepers you shoot, a good place to start is being ready more. You’ll be amazed at how your photography will improve.

My brother doin’ it up right

This weekend my brother came to visit me from Colorado. He also has a friend who lives here who has a boat. Living in a city with several lakes I often hear the phrase, “You don’t want a boat, you want a friend with a boat.” I couldn’t agree more. Well they invited me out for a little wake boarding, which I had never done. Being the photophile that I am, I naturally brought my camera.

But I very quickly realized that shooting this type of photography presented a handful of challenges that could really hamper a photographer that doesn’t know this stuff up and down. So I thought I would give a walk through on what decisions I made before and during shooting to come away with the best photographs possible.

The Challenges

• Things are moving fast, as in most sports photography. This means a fast shutter speed is needed to freeze the action.
• The ride was bumpy. Thanks to choppy water, the boat did a lot of bouncing around which made it hard to keep the camera steady and to keep the shot well composed. It also meant an even faster shutter speed was necessary to combat extreme camera shake. The bumpy ride also made focusing extremely difficult because I just couldn’t see well through the viewfinder.

Sublime Light is a web site dedicated to teaching you to photograph people like a pro. For the latest articles, check out the home page.

I got an email from a reader a couple days ago asking what to do with the files that are obtained when shooting in RAW mode. This seemed like a good time to give a quick primer on shooting RAW and getting your hands on some finished photos.

Why Shoot RAW?

I’ll start with a few reasons why shooting RAW can be a good thing. This list is by no means exhaustive.

• You get a higher dynamic range. Your camera can capture a slightly broader range of light from the shadows to the highlights than if you were shooting JPEGs. Given the narrow range on digital cameras, a little extra can’t hurt.
• You capture the highest quality image. JPEGs are compressed images, and you lose some of the image quality. A RAW file gives you exactly what the sensor captured so that you can make your own decisions later on how to process the image. The trade-off here is that RAW files are much larger than their JPEG siblings thanks to the lack of compression.
• You gain ultimate control. Processing RAW files means you can tweak the image after the fact just like you were making the changes to the camera before you snapped the picture. For example, you can change the white balance on a photo after the fact. You can’t do that with a JPEG.

Software Choices

Viewing and processing RAW files requires a little bit of extra time, knowledge, and software. Here are just a few applications that I’m familiar with for viewing and processing RAW files:

Two weeks ago I showed you a really simple and cheap way to make a lighting reflector out of some aluminum foil and cardboard. It turned out to be a really popular article. It seems you folks really like it when I tell you how to get better photographs without spending much of your dough. I mean who doesn’t like keeping their money?

Shortly after that, reader Philip Litke joined the Sublime Light forums and posted a great tutorial on building an even better, bigger reflector out of an emergency space blanket, some dome tent poles, and some duct tape. You can make this one really big (which isn’t so feasible with cardboard and foil) and it collapses really small for extra portability. It’s also really cheap with the parts costing you under $20.

I have every intention of trying this out. While I do have a set of reflectors, who doesn’t want more? Besides, this is just plain cool if you ask me. When I do try it out, I’ll let you all know how it goes. Heck, maybe I’ll even make a little video tutorial along the way.

If you want to read the full tutorial courtesy of Philip, check it out here.

Oh, and Philip, thanks for joining in the fun and contributing this tip. I bet I’m not the only one who finds it cool.

Original image

We take a lot of pictures with our son, and he has really great skin color. The problem is, when my wife and I are in pictures with him, we always come out looking sunburned while he looks great. Luckily, there’s a quick and easy fix in Photoshop that just gets quicker with a little practice.

You can use this technique in all sorts of ways, but one of the most useful I’ve found is for correcting the skin tone of a portrait subject. For example, you can count on someone getting themselves actually sunburned while everyone else looks fine at least once in your photography days. Here’s how to fix it.

Step 1 - Create a Color Balance adjustment layer. After opening the file in Photoshop, go down to the layers palette and click the icon that’s a half black, half white circle. This pops up a menu for adjustment layers. Choose “Color Balance…”.

Sublime Light is a web site dedicated to teaching you to photograph people like a pro. For the latest articles, check out the home page.

DOF preview
button

There is a feature built into all digital SLR cameras that I know of that goes pretty well unused by many photographers. It’s possible that you didn’t even know it existed. If not, you may want to check it out the next time you break out your camera to shoot your next portrait. It’s the depth-of-field preview button, and it’s usually located near where the lens meets the camera body.

The depth-of-field preview (or DOF preview) button allows you to see what the depth-of-field will be for a given aperture before you press the shutter. As a quick refresher for our more novice readers, the wider your aperture (or the lower the number), the more narrow the depth-of-field will be (or the more the background will be blurred).

Newbie’s
external flash

Hopefully by now you’re starting to see how much better off camera flash makes your photos. But not everyone owns an external flash. If you’re not a professional and you’re not a serious enthusiast, then odds are you only have a camera.

Here’s how many hobbiests progress toward the transition to off camera lighting. They start out buying a SLR. This gets them more into photography. Then they buy a shoe mounted flash for better light. This lets them bounce light off walls and ceilings. Then they finally go for it and get the flash off the camera.

But there’s an option somewhere in the middle if you’re not ready to spend the money for more gear. You can reflect the light from your camera’s on board flash on to a wall, ceiling, or reflector. I’ll show you the simple process for doing this.

Finished reflector

Many hobby photographers would love to run out to the nearest camera store and drop a bunch of cash to buy all the necessary accessories to really make some awesome photographs. Those same hobby photographers would also love to hold on to their significant others, so sometimes priorities must be set. So if you’re one of those people who has been wanting to get a reflector set but doesn’t want to shed the cash, you should know that there are do-it-yourself options.

Here’s how to make your own reflector at home with just a couple of super cheap materials you probably have at home already.

Original Image

If you’ve been taking photographs for any length of time, you’ve surely come across the technique of turning color digital photographs into black and white photographs. Doing this to some photos can really add a level of drama and impact that would not be there if the photo was in color.

But sometimes you have a photo that you don’t like in color. But you don’t like it in black and white either. It’s a no-man’s-land photo, and you need a way to save it. Desaturating the color without completely blowing it away may be a good option.

I’ll show you how to make this simple change to your photo in Photoshop. Any photo editing software should do just fine though if you don’t have Photoshop. Here’s how to do it: